The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand. [Frank Herbert]

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The other day we had a presentation on PL/SQL Developer at AMIS. Theo told a lot about the tool itself and he showed one of my newest plug-ins: Scrapbook. This is a plug in to make sort of a scrap of the current results of the SQL query you just executed.

You could for instance use this to eye-ball the changes that occur in the database when you issue an Insert/Update/Delete statement. When you run your statement again, your old results will be overwritten. Using scrapbook you can make a copy of the data so you can keep it, while rerunning your statement. This could help when checking whether a statement does what it is supposed to. Of course you can ‘easily’ copy the results to Excel or some other tool and use that to compare the results, but for quick and easy access it’s probably better to have it in the current application.

select * from emp (before delete from emp where deptno = 20)

Results on scrapbook

select * from emp (after delete from emp where deptno = 20)

Then there was an issue about executing multiple statements. When you have multiple statements in a single SQL window, and you execute it then all results will be displayed in a separate tabsheet.

You can run a single query by selecting this query and execute this window. But if you fail to select a complete query then you will get an error telling you that an invalid SQL statement has been issued to the database.

Alex asked if it was at all possible to run the current statement, by using a certain hotkey. Standard, this is unfortunately not possible. By using the execute current statement plug-in you can execute the statement under the cursor, regardless of what you have selected in the window. The plug-in selects the current statement, runs it and returns control to the user.

It takes some time to develop such a plug-in and it especially takes some time to figure out how to resolve the question, but that makes it fun to develop such a plug-in.

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3 thoughts on “New PL/SQL Developer plugins”

Hi, I saw your plugin and would love to use it, however, when I run the executable, it says, PL/SQL Developer not found. Does the executable put the DLL somewhere? Are there other files that it creates? Thanks so much for your help!